Having a Mysterious Time, Wish You Were Me
by William Easley
Summary: On a Saturday in June, 2017, Billy Sheaffer has the strangest dream.


_I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you._

* * *

**Having a Mysterious Time, Wish You Were Me**

**(June 17, 2017)**

* * *

Billy Sheaffer woke up that Saturday morning with no memory of when he had fallen asleep. It was very late, he knew that—or very early. He was nearly twelve now, and he'd thought he'd outgrown his night terrors, but the bad dreams had come back, and he was actually afraid to let himself fall asleep.

Anyway, he got out of bed groggy and went downstairs, where Mina and Mira were just finishing their breakfasts. Dad was off at an academic conference in San Diego, Mom was keeping busy in the kitchen, and his sisters barely said hello before barreling out of the house, off to meet their boyfriends.

Billy slumped in his chair and reached for the box of cornflakes and the pitcher of milk. His mom came in. "How are you feeling, honey?" she asked.

He shrugged. "OK." There wasn't very much milk left in the small pitcher. Mom took it. "Here, I'll get you some more. OJ today?"

"Yes, thanks." He spooned up some not-quite-enough-milk flakes and crunched them.

Mom came back with a four-ounce glass of orange juice and poured more milk in the bowl. "Is that enough?"

He nodded. She smoothed his blonde hair. "You're not sick, are you?"

"Just sleepy," he said. "Had a hard time last night."

"Bad dreams?" she guessed.

He shook his head. "That's the funny part. No, I don't remember dreaming. But I was scared I might dream. That doesn't make sense, does it?"

"Everyone gets afraid sometimes," she said, pulling out a chair to sit beside him, her adopted son. "Even moms and dads. It's part of being human. Feeling lonely?"

He shrugged. Loneliness was his ground-state condition. Only when the Pines twins were home in Piedmont did he have much company. Now that school was out for the summer, he didn't have any friends close by. Come to that, even when school was in, he didn't have many friends—he had a girl he liked, but she was off with her folks to the East Coast all summer, and he had guys who tolerated him and now and then would even let him play in their games, but they somehow didn't fit the definition of "friends."

Anyway, Billy was used to loneliness. Sometimes it seemed to him that he'd been lonely for a hundred trillion years.

"Tell you what," his mom said, "I'm caught up on housework, the girls are out for the day, so let's you and I make a day of it. When you get showered and dressed, we'll go to the zoo, and then we'll go anywhere you want for lunch, and in the afternoon we'll go to see any movie you want. Will that cheer you up?"

"Maybe," he said, unable to keep a little smile off his face.

"Good deal."

So he hurried through breakfast, even letting his mom talk him into a piece of toast and a banana to supplement the corn flakes, and then went up to shower.

When he stepped out of the tub, he stood for a moment looking into the mirror. He saw himself, a blue-eyed kid (though one of the eyes was a prosthetic) with maybe too thin a face, sharp-chinned. His shaggy mop of hair—always overdue for a trim—gave his face sort of an inverted triangle look.

For some reason—he couldn't say why, but he had done it from time to time ever since he had known what a mirror was—Billy made a triangle with his forefingers and thumbs and stared through it with his right eye.

The mirror image appeared to do the same, though reversed. Billy knew about how mirrors reversed images, though. He had taught himself to write backwards, in an elaborate kind of print, so if you just looked at it, the writing appeared to be decorative doodles. Holding it up to a mirror, you could read the secret messages: HELLO-MY-BEST-FRIEND.

The main trouble was that he had no best friend, not without Dipper around. Dipper had taught him some simple codes too. No, not codes, what had Dipper called them? Ciphers. Like "three back," where you substituted the third letter back in the alphabet for the ones of your message. That way the same secret message would read, EBIIL-JV-YBPQ-COFBKA.

The idea of codes enchanted him, and he loved to make up his own alphabets, too. Some were all graceful swirls and up-and-down strokes, like the ones Dipper had showed him in a copy of _Lord of the Rings. _Others were simpler. Once, in no more than ten minutes he had created a cipher using the symbols and numbers on the keyboard of his laptop. The greeting to his imaginary friend came out that time as 4 668 & ` "- 2)% 71, which to him looked suitably baffling.

The odd thing, the thing that he couldn't explain even to himself, was that he had taken to signing his cryptograms with an equilateral triangle sketched with an open eye in the center. The triangle was like the pyramid on the back of a dollar _bill, _and the eye was, well, an _eye, _so in a way the triangle-and-eye read "BILL-EYE," close enough to "Billy" to make him feel he had a Secret Identity, like the crime-fighters on the cartoons he watched.

Sometimes he imagined himself in a yellow suit with a magnificent black cape and a black mask with no visible eyeholes, except _he_ could see through the material ("Special one-way fabric," he would explain to the police who wanted to thank him for rounding up the Rattler, the Viper, the Mamba, and the other snakes who worked for the evil crime lord Coral. Of course, she was half in love with him, though it would never work out.)

He even had come up with a superhero name for himself: the Eye. He'd made sketches and colored them with markers. He'd never shown them to anybody, not even to Dipper, but he now and then drew his own comics, the Adventures of the Eye.

"He slips through the somber shades of Shadow City and no one sees. But he sees—the ennigmattic hero known only as—the EYE!"

He hand-lettered these, and sometimes the spelling gave him pause. But "misteryous" hadn't looked right, either, so he'd gone with the harder word. Hey, if you're gonna screw up your spelling, it should be on a difficult word, right?

Somehow he'd slipped off in a daydream, standing towel-wrapped there in the bathroom, looking through his tented fingers at his reflection. "The Eye sees everything," he whispered. "Except he won't look in the girls' room, 'cause that's bad manners and gross."

His eye actually was feeling a little tired from his holding it open and unblinking for so long. He wondered who would win a staring contest, him or his reflection?

If he concentrated, the image in the mirror faded out except for that eye-in-a-triangle. He supposed it looked familiar because he had done this so often. When he had first noticed the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States as pictured on the back of a dollar bill—when had that been? When he was five or six—he'd felt a little jolt of recognition. That was almost, but not quite, what he saw in the mirror.

That was where his "Bill-Eye" alias—was the word alias or alibi? He'd have to look it up. He knew it was one or the other, though.

"Billy! Hustle, and we'll hit the Zoo while it's still cool outside!"

"OK, Mom!"

He dropped his hands and stepped back.

And did a double-take.

Just for an instant, he saw hovering in the mirror a yellow triangle with one eye.

Which winked at him.

Then it was gone.

A lot of kids probably would have been scared. Not Billy, though. He knew about such things as optical illusions—the young girl who turned into an old woman if you looked a second time, the chessboard where two gray squares, one dark, one light, turned out to be the exact same color if you folded the paper to hold them together, the spirals that spun round and round without moving, the whole range.

And he'd read about persistence of vision, the fact that images tended to linger in the eye even after they had vanished. That's why people saw green and purple spots after a bright flash had gone off, or why movies and animated cartoons worked. If you looked at them, they were collections of still pictures—but when they were shown at the rate of twenty-four frames a second, they seemed to move.

So he wasn't scared when the yellow triangle hung there for maybe two seconds before it faded.

Huh. Nobody in the mirror now but him. Correction—not him, but his reflection. He liked to imagine that the kid in the mirror, who was missing his_ right _eye, was named Yllib and was the inhabitant of a nearby parallel universe.

He murmured, "Tnyeff stehv myam wolleh." It was a close approximation of a backwards pronunciation of his go-to phrase for ciphers.

But his best friend, whoever it might be, did not answer. Nor did his reflection. He yelled, "Be there in a minute, Mom!"

But he still stared into the mirror.

"Where are you?" he asked his own reflection.

He got no answer. Not just then.

* * *

While Billy and his mom were watching the bears lumber around their space in the zoo, while Dipper and Mabel were very busy with a crowd of tourists in the Shack, while the Earth rotated on its axis and revolved in its orbit around the sun, various things happened.

In Malaysia there was a small earthquake, barely a tremor. Almost no one noticed, because there it was the middle of the night. Seismologists recorded a 3.4 quake, barely a terrestrial burp.

A wise man in Tibet closed his eyes and repeated a mantra. Then he frowned, uneasy. "Something," he said in his own language, "disturbs the universal harmony." He could not put his psychic finger on it, though.

In the Outback of Australia, in an arid region, it briefly rained, and with the water, down came about a thousand very small fish-_Schindleria brevipinguis_, to be exact. They were native to the sea in the vicinity of the Great Barrier Reef and had no business in the desert, and they were not there for very long. They all perished within a few seconds of striking the ground. Since the largest of them was just 7 millimeters long, no one noticed at all.

In a small shop on a narrow street in New Orleans, shelves full of glass vials and bottles containing items essential to the practice of voodoo suddenly spontaneously shattered, showering the startled owner with goofer dust, zombie powder, High John the Conqueror Oil, dried dragon's blood, Adam and Eve root, essence of myrrh, powdered dittany, and a pint of eyes of newt and a quart of toes of frog, along with something that drifted in the air like dandelion parachutes but was in actuality wool of bats, and some more arcane materials.

The owner's first disgusted thought was, _I need a shower! _His second was _Will my insurance pay for this?_

Well, yes and no.

Various other relatively small-time phenomena heralded a minute change in the reality of the universe that contained Gravity Falls. Almost all of them passed unobserved by almost everyone.

However, the Oracle said, "It is not time yet."

And the Axolotl replied, "The time is coming soon. Billy feels it in the material world, and Bill feels it in the Mindscape."

"I still question your judgment."

"Please do. No one is perfect. I need to be reminded of that now and again."

"The Time Baby?"

"Sleeping in his glacier, dreaming of the time to come."

"Dipper Pines?"

"Happy because he is working with Wendy, his beloved."

"What of my favorite human?"

"Stanford Pines is well aware of what he most needs to be well aware of. And he is happy."

"But after Cipher and Billy merge—"

"We shall see what we shall see. But there will not be an earth-shattering—what is the word? Kaboom? Funny word. I like it. The merging will take place, but Billy will not register it right away. Cipher's mind will bond with his, over many years, as Earth creatures count time. Nine cycles of the earth's trip around the sun must pass before Cipher is fully awake in Billy's mind. And even then the part of Billy that is human will be, as they say, in charge."

"Cipher will corrupt the child."

"There is a possibility. However, should that happen, Cipher loses his only chance to gain what he asked for—A-X-O-L-O-T-L, my time has come to burn. I invoke the ancient powers that I may return."

"You didn't have to grant that request. He could have been gone for good."

"That is why I did grant it—so that he could return. For Good, not for evil."

"I hope you know what you're doing, old lizard."

"This form is amphibious, not reptilian, but thank you, Defender. We shall watch and see."

"And judge."

"We are not grading him, Oracle. However—let us say it will be pass/fail, with no middle option."

"Explain to me—if Bill Cipher successfully incarnates and merges with this human—"

"Almost human," the Axolotl corrected. "Yes?"

"—with this almost human child—young man, as he will be—and if he lives a blameless life as a human—"

"Oh, there will always be people to blame him for something. No one can escape blame, not even saints."

"You know what I mean! If he meets your standards, dies in the body, then you send his spirit back in time to his own dimension so he can have a second chance—and if he avoids evil—then how—?"

"Ah. If Bill Cipher repents and becomes good and not evil and does not kill his own race and eradicate his own universe—then will all of this have happened? His encroaching on human space-time? His attempts to subvert and seduce humans to let him into their reality? Weirdmageddon? Dipper's meeting Wendy? Stanford's creation of the Portal? Will none of that have happened?"

"Yes, yes," the Oracle said impatiently. "That's what I ask you."

"What has happened will still have happened."

"But if Cipher isn't evil, he won't bring about Weirdmageddon!"

"Yes he will, because he did."

"How is that possible."

"Well," the Axolotl said reasonably, "first take a big blob of timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly stuff—"

* * *

Billy had a good day. The zoo was fun, they got to eat at his favorite restaurant, where you could create your own tacos, no matter how bizarre, and then they saw an action movie that was funny and exciting and gave him images he could work into his own fantasy life, and then they came home and told his sisters all about it, and they kidded him and admitted they wished they had gone along, too.

So that night, a tired but happy Billy fell asleep. In a couple of hours, he drifted into the REM state.

And there was the triangle.

Who wrote glowing scarlet letters in the air with his stick-figure finger.

And then said in a strange, humorous, high-pitched voice, "Best friend. That's very important. Everyone should have a bestfriend." He said it as if the two words were just one.

And then the triangle guy vanished.

But Billy woke up feeling as if he were tingling. He remembered the letters exactly, the red glowing ones the triangle guy had written in the air. Billy scrambled out of bed, grabbed a notebook and pen, and wrote them down:

Zsm twv i kbre pghpzvk xle. Aw vtlth qr xsjlj! Jbel ismwgij emgk Qmfx Yimi. Uh brv pj rzi trjry mt yizr vpqw kjrt eqyfrlnwva.

He wanted to try to decode them then and there. But—

As soon as he wrote them down, he felt so sleepy—

So he staggered back to bed, lay down, and in less than a minute, he was asleep.

And there was the yellow triangle guy again. "If you need help," he said, "you can always call on Dipper Pines Tree. Take care of ourself, little guy. We're in it for the long hall."

"The what?" Billy murmured, visualizing a corridor that stretched into infinity, lined with a million doors.

But then he slipped out of the dream state and into deep sleep. At two minutes past six the next morning he found the letters in his notebook but couldn't make anything of them. Underneath them he wrote "Bestfriend code?"

And he decided that, when it was late enough in the morning, he just might call Dipper Pines. He had a feeling, somehow, that he would indeed need a little help.

* * *

The End


End file.
